A song for dead and dying
by Arydubhe
Summary: For Hanji and Levi is time for departures and that is the way I imagine this happening. Death come sooner than expected during the last battle...how can they cope with the end of their dream? A song-fic when description, toughts and lyrics are mixed up to describe the gravity of loss. It's a sad Levihan. Believe me, really sad. Progress: chapter 1/5


Author's note: Hello~ I had no beta readers for this story so be patient with my English, I am an Italian native speaker so I have probably made many mistakes. I hope you will understand the whole thing anyway... Fell free to comment and give me any advice. This story is LEVIHAN. A really sad one. I hope you will enyoj it a little bit. See YA!

Chapter 1: TIME OF DYING

The smoke was slowly rising all around, overcoming the tops of the trees in the forest. Thick and black, it was emanating into a myriad of columns from the bodies of dead titans on the ground, in the evaporation of their dead meat.

A spark went to lie on Hanji's hand. It burned, but just a little.

She was laying against a pine trunk, upstream, out of the reach of the titans, most of which were 7 and 8-meter class, who still infested the area. One of them, a 15-meter-high abnormal, was stacked at the base of the tree, its jaws wide open in her direction. It had spent at last fifteen minutes in that position, waiting for her to tumble down. If Hanji was ever to fall below, there'd be no hope for her to escape him.

It was somehow curious that the titan had been staring at her for so long, focused and almost obsessed with her, refusing to point its eyes elsewhere even for only one second, though the ground was basically covered with dead bodies of humans that the monster could eat quietly and effortlessly. But the titan seemed not to care at all about them…

"It's a shame that I have not been able to find out the reason behind the different levels in titan's intelligence...or why the aberrants exist at all" Hanji thought, staring at the monster below- still frozen in that threatening position- and reflecting upon the behavior that exemplar was showing.

She let out a sly grin. Making hypotheses and observations even at that moment: that was indeed professional deformation ...

"Sorry, but I'm not going to feed you, dear ..." she shouted in the direction of the titan, sticking out her tongue. But an excess of cough prevented her from yelling anything else towards the beast.

When she lowered her hand, her palm was smeared with blood.

"Great…"

Actually there was nothing to be surprised of. She was trying her best to ignore the pain that ran through her whole body and that was making her shake more and more as time was going on. And it was so difficult to endure the suffering with the wounds she had...

Not that anyone might have been able to hear her screaming out for pain, anyway: because in that forest, for miles, Hanji was sure there was no one. No one was left from the titans attack. And as for titans ... even without making noise at all, her smell and the smell of her blood was just enough to attract them...it was the uselessness of expressing her pain that restrained her to cry it out loud.

The woman drooled even more against the wrinkled cortex after a new cough attack: «Cough cough cough!»

Damn. That was not gonna end well…

She tried to stretch more, straightening her back ... She was struggling more and more to breathe.

Hanji was not in a "bad shape": the situation was even worse. She had more than a few broken ribs, and the right leg had completely gone... Not to mention the left flank as well.

Her division ended up trapped in a patch of vegetation that fluttered with titans while they were travelling to reach the meeting point agreed with Levi and the others; they were supposed to unify their teams and proceed with the definitive attack on Marley.

But Hanji didn't honestly expect to find that number of titans in the area. Armin and the woman had chosen this particular zone to start the fight with Marley exactly because they thought it was the safest: cleared by titans on purpose previously and filled with high trees, it was perfect to handle 3DMG in the best way. Point was Hanji understood too late during the operation that the one who truly choose the battlefield were not them at all, but the Marleyans, who made sure to annihilate them using a horde of newly created titans. They had been totally tricked…and in a fucking stupid way: outnumbered and divided to split their power and reduce the danger they may represent.

Ironically enough, in Hanji thoughts they were supposed to ambush Marley troops…

Luckily enough, Marleyans themselves retreated at the sight of the titans, leaving Hanji's squad to deal with titans alone. Still hard a task anyway. Because that glitch, considering the conspicuous losses her squad had already suffered during the ambush Marleyan soldiers had trapped them in, proved to be more dramatic than expected and even the reinforcements they received were not able to be seriously of help.

Then it happened.

At one point, during that increasingly desperate fight, a 10 -meter-class giant leaped out from her right side, the one blinded by the eyepatch, catching her off guard. No one came to rescue her: at that point, she already was the only person still alive of her team; so in a blink of an eye she was completely swept away by the giant.

Hanji had tried to move out, unlocking and relaunching the three-dimensional maneuvering system harpoons in the direction of the nearest tree, modifying their trajectory so much at least to escape the giant grip. But it was all in vain.

Her reaction was too slow. To swat the woman in midair and to knock her against a tree was no big deal for the titan... easy as a man smashing a fly. The slap almost knocked her out, and, worse, it sent her to crash against a broken branch, which pierced trough her side, taking away everything for a moment: breath, hope, desire to live. For a second there was only a pain she had never felt before. She was being literally impaled at the trunk of the tree, the titan's hand crushing and pressing her even more against the rough surface, holding the woman in mid-air caught in between wood and flash, while the cables, without any grip, were dangling and swaying, feets and feets below.

Fortunately – if you may call it "fortune" - however, the titan had been putting pressure mainly on her legs; with the result that she gained a fully mauled limb, an obvious distal fracture and painful wounds ... however, in that position, she also guessed the possibility of an escape route, as desperate as it was, at the very moment when the titan would have loosened the grip onto her body in order to grab her completely and bring her to its mouth. Thinking well, she'd been lucky indeed that the titan didn't immediately catch her in a deadly clasp...

So she waited for the right moment; then as soon as she felt the giant muscles move to change position, with a huge struggle she detached herself from the tree, uplifting her body with trembling arms, ignoring the pain of the torn apart flesh and the shards of wood stuck in the wound; she violently released the leftover gas and rocketed away from the 10-metres-class titan jaws, rapid as light is.

Hanji turned around, fast, calculating the distance that separated her from the neck of the Titan, whom she was hooked by the shoulders in search of the momentum she could no longer have with her legs ... and in the first flap of skin she found the woman plunged the blades, despite they were partially corroded by the blood of all the titans she had killed earlier - and Hanji had totally lost the account of how many she had been knocking down since the last, desperate battle against Maley had begun. The woman screamed with all the breath she had in her throat while striking, hoping that the poor edge that remained on the sword was sufficient. She had no other option than to kill the titan in a single blow…kill or be killed was the matter.

She fiercely prayed her desperate move was not effortless…

She was almost astonished to hear the metal pierce trough the flesh, leaving a sharp, precise, surgical wound after all. Because of her well-trained reflexes, probably, and of her survival instinct arising. Honestly, she herself had not really believed in that move until that moment ... But the heat of the hot blood splashes that smeared her hands and face had been eloquent, as well as the thud of the huge body of the monster who hit the ground behind hef.

She made it.

But Hanji had no time to exult nor contemplate her own work- the nape severed from the rest of the body of the titan, the muscle shred still pulsating on the ground; her real problem at that point was to stop her randomic zig-zag movement between the branches: but with a lower part of the leg in that state, she had no hope to be able to curb the drift taken ... so in extremis, as soon as she was able to locate a suitable tree, Hanji resolved that the only option she had left behind was a crash-landing, well calculated, hoping that the movement could be somehow slowed down turning around the trunk, making what was inevitably going to be an harsh impact, softened as far as possible.

Even after all the evaluations, despite all the precautions, however, eventually Hanji almost crashed against the trunk onto which she was now laying her back; thank goodness, on a physical level she didn't take any further damage; but the 3DMG had definitively kicked the bucket, the lateral metal fixing bar was broken, and even the left leg fastening secure was ripped up. The way she looked, with broken right pulley, dry gas cylinders, empty blade cases, and no sword at her disposal, she was now completely defenseless. But it was the general situation to be desolate: full of deep wounds, with a broken gear and isolated from others, things for Hanji were no good at all.

"At least I'm safe here," she said, glancing at the Titan below: at least the height of the branch on which she decided to land was well chosen.

Unuseful as they were, truncated at the base, Hanji dropped down the metal stump still attached to the handle, nothing more than a semi-fused grip that couldn't serve any purpose, not even as a mere blunt object. In spite of the distance, Hanji could still distinguish, through the cracks on her googles, the rest of the blades: they were attached to the giant neck, two slim metal strips, shimmering in the middle of the smoke columns rising from the 10-meters-titan's evaporation. They shined like medals, reflecting the light that penetrated beyond the foliage and the spark of fire.

"Well, sure I can say that the last act of my short life- Hanji said, comforting at that sight- was a fucking example of titanicide ..."

It was satisfying, in fact. Even though there was no one to congratulate her for the accomplishment, at that moment, no one who would witness the performance she just made.

So she stayed, firm, drained of any strength, unable to use the 3DMG, absolutely uncredulous that, for better or worse, she was still alive ... even though she was ignoring how longer she'd been able to resist.

But now that the adrenaline was decreasing, the devastating pain she felt from every single part of her body clearly showed how serious her situation was. Besides, she possessed sufficient medical knowledge to fully assess the physical conditions in which she was ... and they were not ideal. They were not at all.

For this reason, she was even surprised she had been able to be cleared headed all that time, to say it all. Desperate and ready for everything she had been, yes, but lucid.

"And better it is that I keep up staying conscious. I'm losing too much blood ... if I fall asleep it'is the end ..."

Eventually the titan down there ended up making her company with its presence. Surely his threat helped keeping her vigilant and present so far.

Hanji spat for the third time the blood that flew back in her mouth at every cough and distracted her gaze by force from the wound on her side. She could only see a hole where she once had a kidney.

She clinched her leg with a clinical eye: if she was ever to get out of that situation, she seriously doubted she would ever be able to walk on that thing again.

Probably, Hanji reflected bitterly, it was the fate of who becomes the Commander of the Survey corps to destroy himself and lose some limbs. The woman, naively, had almost believed that she had already paid the bill fairly when she lost an eye ... She had been a dreamer.

"Who knows what they will find when rescue team arrives ..." she asked herself.

Because sooner or later someone would have come to pick her or bring her dead body back.

Between a rale and another, in fact, as soon as she had been able to gain a stable position on the branch where she landed, she had launched flares to notify her position. A red one to say that the area was full of titans; a black one to point out that the team had suffered huge losses - not to say complete defeat. And two blue flares to signal that she was hurt.

Levi was the one who insisted for this color to be added to the choice of the available flares.

"If you were to need it ... use it" he said, handing in to her a pistol and a bag of blue colored flares just before that nightmare of this last battle began.

She hesitated: "It's not right ... you know I'm against favoritism. And definitely my life is not a priority in this mission ... "

The Captain almost slapped her.

"No, you must use it, moron!" he peremptory replied, gripping her arms, even hurting her. "Put in that idiot head of yours that you are fundamental for all of us…and for me."

"Levi ..."

"If you were to be severely wounded ..." the man added; the voice rumpled in a murmur and a gruff rasp: it was clear that he did not even want to think about that eventuality - I want to know, got it? I order you to let me know by launching two flares. All right?"

But Hanji did not answer back there ,and silence dropped between the two of them.

"If you want, I'll do the same ... As far as the credibility of the idea is concerned, I will pray to the last moment that none of them will serve us."

So she took them at least, but she did not negotiate more: "I'll think about it."

"Well, he was right afterall"…Hanji had to admit.

But what concerned her the most at the moment and relieved her at least, was that, thank goodness, Levi had not been using any of those signals so far. He was fine…

"LEVI ..."

Hanji smiled. At least at that moment Levi would have been proud of her; for once she had obeyed him. Hanji was partially sorry she had to choke on her words. But when you really arrive one step from death, it is normal, perhaps, to review your own cards on the table ...

She only hoped that her resolve to launch those signals was not to cause too much trouble in the other ranks. Sure enough, Levi was putting up a fight in order to run to her side now. None and nothing would have been able to restrain him.

But Hanji had no strength left now for real. She was sensing her consciousness slowly slipping away.

She could not survive ... at this point she was well aware of that.

With that little mental presence still left, Hanji unlocked the safety of 3DMG steel cables and with them she wrapped herself at the tree, chest and legs fixed by the wire. Extreme measures not to slip down to Jerry - so she decided to nick the Titan down there.

If everything had gone well, maybe it would have been possible for Levi to find her placidly asleep in the sleep of death. If everything had gone perfectly, when he would have arrived, she could even got to say goodbye to him. It was worth to try to stay alive for that single instant.

She allowed herself a sigh, though her oxygen was now dear to her. She had done her best, even though it was not enough. Still, even though she did not know why, she was smiling.

"My only regret is that I won't probably see you a last time, Levi." she thought, right before falling into unconsciousness.

Maybe, by the time, she'd better launched those flares sooner...


End file.
